It had been two months of misery for both of them – though the misery was of different sorts. For Freddy it was primarily physical. He had had the second, major operation on his knee. It went well,
according to the surgeon – the senior and most pessimistic of the three specialists – but convalescence was still drawn-out and painful and boring. Freddy’s exercise regime was much duller and much more repetitive than training for football had ever been. He did not feel in full control of his body, and hated that. The whole process was a physical sinking-in of the reality he was facing: his injury might never get better, he might never be the same again, his life in football was almost certainly over. The thing he lived to do, he wasn’t going to be able to do any more. Freddy was not prone to depression, but even he sometimes felt that what had happened to him was a form of death sentence.
Patrick’s misery was in his head rather than in his body. He was possessed by a sense that, in addition to everything that had already gone wrong, yet more would go wrong: the insurance company would find what they were so clearly looking for, a loophole to avoid paying out, and yet Freddy would also be unable to play football again, so they would lose out in every way: no insurance, no livelihood and no chance for Freddy to do the thing he loved. They had come to London full of hope and would be leaving it stripped bare. The only thing left to them would be going home – but that, to Patrick, was a consolation so large that it too was now becoming a kind of torment. Home, Africa, Senegal, Linguère, their house, their bed, waking up next to Adede, the weight of his daughters when they jumped up on him and demanded a hug, an evening in the police bar with his old colleagues, the food that actually tasted of something, the bite of cold beer on a hot night, the sweat on the bottle rolled over your forehead, the sense of being known in a place you knew; that you were taking up your allotted space on the earth. Speaking your own language, all day. Home. All of it – home.
Both Kamos twitched at the noise of a key in the lock. Mickey did what he always did, which was to put the key in, turn it and open the door an inch, then ring the doorbell to announce his presence, then come in. Well, it was his house – which was presumably the unconscious point. He came bouncing in, which with another man would have been a good omen, except Mickey on purpose kept his energy levels high when he had bad news, as a way of being hard to read.
‘Sorry I couldn’t call last night. We went on a bit after ten and I didn’t want to break our arrangement. And anyway, I wanted to tell you in person. So here I am,’ said Mickey. He knew Patrick wouldn’t think to offer him a cup of tea – he was hospitable, but sweetly, laughably bad at things he was used to thinking of as female work. So Mickey just sat down at the table and dumped his briefcase down on it, looking across at the two Kamo men. They were grey with anticipation.
‘Ready?’ said Mickey. They nodded. ‘OK. Here it is. The good news is that the insurers are offering to honour the value of the contract. They were legally obliged to do that, since that’s what’s being insured, but you know what they’re like. So that promises a single payment of five million pounds, tax-free both here and in Senegal.’
‘Five million pounds,’ said Patrick. He looked at Freddy, who showed nothing.
‘Five million pounds,’ said Mickey. ‘Which is the good news. Bad news, or any rate less good, is that there are certain conditions. Which we knew there would be, but still. The main one they asked for is that Freddy is not allowed to play football again. Ever.’
‘Never,’ said Freddy. ‘Not with friends?’
Smiling a little, Mickey said, ‘No, they can’t stop you having a kick-about with your mates. What they mean is, playing any kind of football for which you get paid. Or representative football for that matter, where you can earn money from image rights or sponsorships or whatever.’
‘Never,’ said Freddy.
‘Yes. As I say, that’s what they wanted. That’s what we were arguing about. And that’s why the bad news isn’t entirely bad news, pure and simple – because it turns out, I won’t lie to you, to my surprise, they were more imaginative than I thought. They saw the point. The deal we ended up with, finally, is that Freddy can’t play football anywhere in Europe or the Americas or Asia. But he can play in Senegal. He can run out on a football field again. If he gets in the national team or something and there’s sponsorship rights, they might want some of that money. But anyway, that’s the headline news. No football in Europe, but he can play in the league at home.’
Mickey had fought hard for this: to be able to say to Freddy that his life in football was not over. It was to his complete amazement that he first sensed possible flexibility on the part of the insurers, and then detected actual movement. It hadn’t taken him long to work out why. It was partly that the amounts in question were so small they wouldn’t feel cheated – Freddy would be lucky to earn the equivalent of ten grand a year in Senegal, even fully fit and at the height of his powers. However mean and pissy the insurers were, not even they could worry about defending that to their shareholders. That was one thing. But the more important thing, he gradually realised, was that they thought the whole issue was moot. For all their stalling, they believed the gloomiest medical prognosis. They didn’t think Freddy would ever kick a ball in anger again. Allowing him to play pro football back home was like giving him permission to be the first man on Mars – it just wasn’t going to happen.
No need to tell Freddy that, though. Mickey watched the news sink in, and Freddy reached for his father’s hand.
‘I get to play football again?’ he said.
‘And five million pounds. And,’ said Patrick, looking for the first time in months like a man with something to look forward to, ‘we get to go home.’
A
t number 42, the garden which had been Petunia Howe’s great joy in life, her hobby and her solace, was being dug up and replaced. Zbigniew stood at the window of the main bedroom on the first floor, the room in which Petunia had died, and watched.
He had come back to fix some wall sockets in the bedroom. The wiring was a little loose and so the power supply was intermittent. He had promised a year’s guarantee as well as the work he’d done, and he was happy to come back and fix it, even though the house no longer belonged to the Leatherbys. It had been bought by a City banker and his American wife, a childless couple in their early thirties who had paid £1,550,000 for it. The house was as yet unfurnished; the new people were going to get a team of painters in. Zbigniew didn’t mind that, part of doing up a house to sell it included the assumption that the new owners would change stuff. It wasn’t his house anyway. But he did find that he disliked seeing the garden torn out. The new owners wanted a more modern look. The crowded, profuse, overgrown, overliving plant beds of old Mrs Howe were to be replaced by a geometric pattern of decking and gravel and pavings, with a water feature at the end, and four small square formal beds of low shrubs. So now four men from the garden design company were ripping out Petunia’s garden and bodily carrying the debris through to the skip at the front of the house, over the plastic sheeting they’d put in to protect the carpet.
The Sunday on which Zbigniew had taken the money and given
it back to Mrs Leatherby had turned into the best day of his life. The first reason: Mrs Mary Leatherby had rung him up in the early evening and had told him about the money. It had been worthless, or all but worthless, all along. If Zbigniew had tried to spend it, he would have had no explanation of how he had all this out-of-date currency and he would have been caught as a thief. He would have lost his honour, and for nothing. He felt the way a man feels when he’s been about to step out into the road without looking, then caught himself at the last moment and just avoided a speeding car.
But that wasn’t the main reason it was the best day of his life. The main reason was that when he had got back to the train station and found Matya sitting outside the café, he had said, ‘What shall we do now?’ and she had shrugged and said, ‘Let’s go to bed.’ For a moment he had thought he was undergoing an aural hallucination. But the look she gave him told him he wasn’t. That was the single happiest and best and most surprising moment of his entire life to date. They had spent the trip home kissing, carried on snogging on the Tube, kissed all the way up the stairs to her flat, and then stayed in bed until it was time for both of them to go to work on Monday morning. It would be an exaggeration to say that they had been in bed ever since. But it wouldn’t be all that much of an exaggeration. He simply couldn’t get enough of her, her body and her company – it wasn’t just the sex (though it was, obviously, that too) and the amazing thing was that she seemed to, said she did and acted as if she did, feel the same way about him. She said she liked the way he was truthful and the way he stood in his shoes. Zbigniew wasn’t quite sure what that meant so was happy to take it as a compliment.
It happens quickly when it happens, and it had happened to Zbigniew and Matya. Now they were looking for a flat together. They were spending two evenings and one weekend afternoon a week flat-hunting – they had agreed to do it that way, and take as long as they needed to find a place which felt right, rather than blitz it and be worn down and give in to the first plausible thing they saw.
Zbigniew, who could see that work was beginning to dry up, had once or twice mentioned Poland, how cheap it was, how beautiful the countryside was, how warm and open-hearted his family were; to which
Matya would reply by talking about the glories of Hungarian food and culture and landscape. And there was a serious language question over her learning Polish or his learning Hungarian. So it was London, now and for the foreseeable future, and for Zbigniew that was about as unexpected as finding Matya had been. The fact that this had come to be the place where he lived, not just where he was passing through or cashing in, had not formed any part of his plan. Matya had a new job as a translator – one of her employers was a senior executive at a building firm which employed many Hungarians and had just lost its former interpreter to a better offer from someone else. So Matya now spent her day in a yellow hard hat, earning twice what she’d earned before, with the prospect of taking that career forward and/or applying for a desk job. From what she said, they loved her and were desperate to keep her. Zbigniew did not find that at all hard to understand.
Even Piotr liked Matya. No, that was wrong – of course he liked (and fancied) Matya: who wouldn’t? What was remarkable was that even Piotr was willing to show pleasure in Zbigniew and Matya being together. They’d all been out to Sunday lunch at a Polish pub in Balham, and it had been a success. Piotr had brought his girlfriend, a girl from Krakow who worked as a teaching assistant in a primary school, and the whole occasion had been like a version of the old days which hadn’t actually happened like that the first time round, since they’d never lazed around and hung out with girlfriends in that way. Piotr’s view of Zbigniew seemed to have undarkened, and they would now spend time together without it feeling as if they were constantly having an unspoken argument.
A man with a clipboard came into Petunia’s garden. It was clear that he was in charge of the other four men: he stood and held out the clipboard and compared it to the evidence of work in progress in front of him. It was apparent that something wasn’t quite right. Two of the men straightened and came over, and a discussion between the three of them began, all the men nodding and pointing as they talked about what they would do with the garden once they had got rid of all the plants and greenery that Petunia Howe had loved. Zbigniew turned his attention away from the window and bent to his work.
M
any things can go concealed in the hurly-burly of family life. Shahid and Usman had not spoken or interacted in any way for four months – and nobody else in the family had noticed. For the last two of those months, Usman had been in Lahore with their mother, taking a break from London, reacquainting himself with Pakistani life, and very nearly arranging to get married to a lawyer’s fourth daughter. He had been so close to deciding to do it that he had had to go away to think it over, so here he was in London again, and much more relieved to be back than he wanted to admit. Usman was coming to think that your roots were not necessarily the same thing as your home, but he didn’t yet know what to make of the thought.
On the morning after he got back, he went to see Shahid at his flat. He noticed that his brother had installed a CCTV camera over the door; there was a pause and he was buzzed in. Shahid was standing at the top of the stairs. It’s not easy to look dignified and outraged while wearing an open dressing gown with a pair of Y-fronts clearly visible, but Shahid was managing to do it.
‘You little shit,’ he said. ‘I know it was you.’
‘This is the part where I’m supposed to say, “Please let me explain,” ’ said Usman.
‘Fuck you. Fuck your explanation. I was in a cell for nineteen days because of you. And don’t for a moment, don’t for a single moment,
think I didn’t know right from the start who was to blame for that stupid stunt. In fact the only thing I blame myself for is not having realised the first time I saw those stupid postcards. “We Want What You Have”. I should have thought, let me see. Who’s stupid enough to think this is interesting, lazy enough so he doesn’t have a proper job so he has the time to do it, enough of a political cretin to think it’s a significant gesture of some sort, retarded enough to keep doing it even after it starts to get people worked up, and just enough of a geek to do it on the web? Stupid, lazy, politically cretinised, retarded, spends all his time wanking on the internet. Oh of course! My younger brother!’
Shahid was still standing at the top of the stairs.
‘Can I come up now?’ said Usman. Shahid stepped back from the stairwell and Usman took that as a yes. He trudged up. Shahid was stood at the sink with his arms folded. Usman sat down and took a breath.